Patrick: In addition to representing what I have always hoped is Peirce's
developmental teleology, your description of sign function seems to me to
get to the heart of pragmatic discourse analysis in which conventional sign
structures and meanings ("syntactics" and "semantics") serve principally as
orientation to what the situated discourse is being used to do.
I would only add that it is sometimes useful to recognize that a number of
differentiable processes occur simultaneously within the great "alpha"
process. There is the "action" processes associated with "life-forms."
There is the "motion/matter" processes associated with "non-life-forms."
(I'm using these terms only as gestures, fingers that point in a given
direction, and not as depictions.) The highly ephemeral acts of sign usage
are "real" events in several related but distinct processes--e.g, those
physical, physiological, psychological and sociological processes necessary
to communication acts. It seems to me these different processes often get
confused or conflated. Existential "objects" are also events, but typically
in a much slower process that makes them available to our exteroception for
comparatively vast periods of time, which we think makes them "empirically"
real, extant. I think it is not very useful to speak of signs as existing
in the same process as existential objects, but if we must, perhaps we can
say, "Yes, signs exist, but much faster than objects do."
Bill Bailey
Patrick Coppock wrote, in part:
According to Peirce's developmental teleology, these three "aspects" of
the sign (function), by way of which we are able to "experience" or
"recognise" the "presence" of any given (manifest for someone or
something) sign, are destined to keep on "morphing" into one another
continuously, emerging, submerging and and re-emerging again as the
meanings we singly or collectively attribute to the signs we encounter
from day to day continue to grow in complexity -- at different rates of
development, of course, depending on the relative "strength" of the habits
(mental or otherwise) that "constrain" Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness
and allow them to "oscillate"/ "morph" in relation to one another at
different "rates" in different situations and contexts, and allow them to
be conceived of by us as "conventionally" (or otherwise) representing
"signifying" (or culturally meaningful, if you like) units/
configurations/ events/ states of affairs.
Every culturally significant "event" that we are able to conceive of as a
sign (objects, thoughts, actions etc.) may then be seen to "embody" or
"posess", to a greater or lesser degree, and more or less saliently, all
three qualities/ aspects of the sign (Firstness, Secondness, Thirdness)
at any given time in the ongoing flow of semiosis.
---
Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
